


Storm Clouds Brewing Behind My Eyes

by FeathersMcStrange



Series: Undead Beverly 'Verse [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV), Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Beverly Lives, Character Death Fix, Friendship, Gen, Not Really Character Death, Road Trips, Supernatural Elements, Undead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-24
Updated: 2015-06-24
Packaged: 2018-04-05 23:35:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4199319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeathersMcStrange/pseuds/FeathersMcStrange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is Saturday evening.</p>
<p>Beverly Katz has been dead for a week and six days.</p>
<p>Beverly Katz has been alive for a week and five days.</p>
<p>She left work on a Saturday and died on a Sunday and came back to work Monday morning, and something inside her feels wrong.</p>
<p>As the situation stands, Beverly has a bag packed and the car fueled with gas, ready to make the trek to South Dakota. There are no answers for her here, and there is no way – in heaven or hell or wherever – she is letting a group of practically salivating government scientists run tests on her. </p>
<p>So she is going to be her own investigator and track down the one lead she has. It is a long shot, one tiny chance in a trillion, but she has to take it. It is the only shot she has.</p>
<p>Somewhere in South Dakota there is a woman. Her name is Mrs. Frederic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Storm Clouds Brewing Behind My Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> Second piece of the undead!Beverly Katz series. No knowledge of Warehouse 13 technically necessary.
> 
> As always, for Swan.

> _My thoughts are the cold kind_  
>  _I’ve got storm clouds that are brewing behind my eyes  
>  _ _And my heart will be blacker than your eyes  
>  _ _When I’m through with you_
> 
> _\- Radical Face, 'Black Eyes’_

It is Saturday evening.

Beverly Katz has been dead for a week and six days.

Beverly Katz has been alive for a week and five days.

They tell her she is a miracle, an anomaly, and they want to run…  _tests_. But the thing is they tell her she is a miracle in the same voice you use when discovering a snake with two heads, and she feels  _sick_.

She is no miracle. She is a universal impossibility, an outlier on a graph of data that has not deviated since the birth of time itself. She left work on a Saturday and died on a Sunday and came back to work Monday morning, and something inside her feels wrong. Beverly does not feel miraculous. She feels… Honestly, Beverly is not sure what she feels. But it is strong and old and it reeks of chaos. All of a sudden her life – is that what you call it, when you bite it and come back swinging? - is riddled with uncertainty and confusion.

And there is no one who can help her.

Oh, Brian and Jimmy – bless them – made an effort. But given this had less to do with corpses, bees, and Star Trek, and more to do with a mysterious, ancient, unwieldy power that could literally reverse death (if that’s what the kids were calling it these days), they were both pretty solidly in over their well intentioned heads.

As the situation stands, Beverly has a bag packed and the car fueled with gas, ready to make the trek to South Dakota. There are no answers for her here, and there is no way – in heaven or hell or  _wherever_  – she is letting a group of practically salivating government scientists run tests on her. So she is going to be her own investigator and track down the one lead she has. It is a long shot, one tiny chance in a trillion, but she has to take it. It is the only shot she has.

Somewhere in South Dakota there is a woman. Her name is Mrs. Frederic. She holds the only possibility Beverly has of getting answers, of being able to  _understand_. So she has packed what she needs and left the rest behind in a house that doesn’t feel like home any more than the air in her lungs feels like anything more than muscle memory. She is standing in her living room, coat buttoned all the way up to her collarbone, scarf wrapped around her neck and knit cap pulled down over her hair, staring at the clock. It’s not like she feels cold, at least not in the way derived from an external source. Two backwards revolutions of an hourglass would have found her standing in her bathroom, staring at a thermometer she does not dare put into her mouth for fear of the number it would display.

Beverly knows that this is wrong, that she is cold and there is a rage in her chest she is wholly unfamiliar with, but tangible evidence is the soul of science and she is at her soul a scientist, and to see it undeniably there before her in degrees of temperature… There are some denials she would like to hold onto, even as she hardly sleeps and sometimes swears she cannot feel her heart beating inside her icy chest.

That was two hours ago and this is now, snow falling outside, forming drifts in the relentless wind. She has to leave now if she wants to make it to the highway before the quiet streets of her neighborhood are impassible. Seconds before her gloved hand closes around the doorknob, a knock sounds, startling her. Her flinch is accompanied by a loud pop and a soft 'damn it’. She pushes the door open with only a cursory glance to see who is standing on her porch, walking back into the kitchen to clean up the exploded bulb.

“You shouldn’t be here. I’m leaving,” Beverly says halfheartedly, kneeling down and sweeping the fragmented glass into a dust pan, dumping it listlessly into the bin by the doorway. Jimmy scoffs quietly and Brian shakes his head. (Her eyesight has gotten so much sharper; even the slightest movement in the corner of her eye looks high def.)

“Look you’re not gonna manage to drive all night like I’m sure you’re planning to without somebody there to spell you out, and three people can drive a whole hell of a lot longer than two can.” Jimmy pauses, studying her face, trying to get a read on her. “I mean of course if you don’t want us to come, we won’t. It’s up to you. But we’ve both got bags packed and enough caffeine to fuel an entire college dorm for a week, so. Your call.”

She stares shrewdly at both of them for a long moment, weighing pros and cons. Her mother’s voice rings in her head, 'there is safety in numbers, Beverly’, and she’s not sure how she feels about 'safety’ per se, but there is something to be said for not being alone. So against her better judgement (that is to say thinking with a person’s heart as opposed to an analyst’s head) she dips her chin and leads the way out the front door.

The trees race by in a series of green and shadowed blurs. If either of her companions are uncomfortable in the freezing air of the car, breath fogging in front of them, they say nothing. Beverly’s breath makes no gentle mist in the air in front of her. She catches Brian looking at her from the passenger’s seat, long after the moon is suspended in the sky, a pearl set into star spun cosmos, hours after Jimmy falls asleep in the back seat.

“What?” she asks, trying to keep hostility from her voice. He has an odd expression on his face. Halfway between worry and intimidation.

“Are you okay?”

The part of Beverly that doesn’t want to laugh kind of feels like crying. She doesn’t do either. She sighs. When she was little she used to stomp around huffing in the frigid air, pretending to be a dragon with smoke for breath and fire in her heart. Silently she apologizes to the little girl she used to be. There are no more dragons in her mind. There are monsters living in their place.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

Brian nods and lets his forehead drop to the glass of the window. He’s got to be wearing like three coats, but still he does not ask that she turn the heat on. She’s glad he doesn’t. Heat is one of those things, like sudden loud noises and sunflowers. It doesn’t feel right to her any more.

Neither of them says anything else. He takes over driving at about two in the morning, and Beverly watches the miles slide past them and thinks about the nature of starships. About careering through black nothingness that stretches on as far as the eye can see (much like a deserted highway in the dark hours of the night) with nothing but a crew of likeminded reckless star-junkies alongside you, ready to hurtle into the farthest reaches of space, even if it means none of them will ever make it back. She thinks about the Enterprise and about how stars can implode farther and farther into themselves, creating a black hole from which nothing can escape. She thinks about Jimmy and Brian and why she didn’t shout at them until they just  _went home_.

Eventually she figures it was because that much shouting at once might have literally killed them both and besides, if she’s going to career through black nothingness that stretches on as far as the eye can see, she’d rather have her crew of likeminded reckless star-junkies alongside her.

South Dakota is the most orange place Beverly has ever seen. The sun rises over the badlands, setting the scenery on fire. It glows with an ethereal light, dazzling and daunting her. Jimmy is driving now. She’s glad it isn’t her behind the wheel, because the light is blinding her.

She has never in her lif- She has never to her memory seen this much light in one place. It is beautiful. It terrifies her.

The address written on the scrap of paper in her sweater pocket leads her to a place called Leena’s Bed and Breakfast. Beverly instructs Brian and Jimmy and their trunk full of luggage to a motel she saw about fifteen minutes back, and says when they ask if she wants them to go in with her that this is a step of her quest she has to take on her own. They both try and smile reassuringly and it comes out like a pair of lopsided grimaces, but the effort is nice anyway. Jimmy tips his chin and Brian awkwardly pats her shoulder and she can hear them bickering quietly down the walkway away from the door she now stands in front of.

Maybe she should have run after them, called 'I changed my mind, I don’t want to do this alone’, but the decision has already been made and she has to live with it.

The door swings open with a low, long creak before she can raise a fist to knock. Her hands are clenched into fists beside her and it takes every ounce of concentration in her body to contain the humming energy she can feel prickling just below the surface of her skin. Exploding lightbulbs and suddenly blazing fireplaces and stoves do not a good first impression make, she reminds herself as she steps into the cool, dark house.

“She said you were coming.” The young woman who closes the door behind her is about Beverly’s age, and she is beautiful. Her hair falls in a cloud of tightly curled ringlets, bouncing against her soft tanned cheeks. Knowing brown eyes sweep over Beverly, and she takes Beverly’s hands in hers. “I’m Leena. You must be Beverly.” A crease develops between her brows and Leena tilts her head to the side. Her hands are warm and firm, holding Beverly’s like a blessing. “I’m sorry for what’s happening to you. It must be frightening.”

The question hovers on the edge of Beverly’s lips, but she lets it die there. There is an air of understanding around Leena, a sense that she knows and she gets it and she does not blame you.

“It is.” The admission itself frightens her. As if speaking aloud yes, this scares her more even than Hannibal Lecter himself, will somehow invite the fear to consume her entirely.

“She can help you. She knows a great deal about a great many things. Come in. She’s waiting.” Leena leads Beverly to a room in the back, with a softly glowing light in the ceiling casting golden hues across a room of muted carpeting and ancient overstuffed armchairs. A soft film of dust covers the bookshelves that line the walls, particles filtering through the air.

Beverly doesn’t notice that Leena has left her there until a second woman speaks in a hush.

“You poor unfortunate girl.”

There is not a trace of condescension in the regret and compassion stained voice that comes from behind her. The woman who steps from the shadows carries centuries of power in every step she takes, dark eyes and a solemn expression on a face that is a warm, dark brown and carries no hint of an age that Beverly estimates behind human comprehension. Hundreds of thin brown braids are spun and twisted into an elegant up-do, coiled neatly on top of the woman’s head. Her hands are clasped in front of her, glasses perched on her nose and a double-strand of pearls shining at her throat.

“Mrs. Frederic.”

“Miss Katz.”

They stand face to face in the center of a dimly lit room, and there is an immense cloying weight to the air.

“I don’t know where else I can go,” Beverly says quietly. Mrs. Frederic studies her.

“You came to the right place. We have some measure of experience with phenomena such as this. You’re the girl in the papers, aren’t you.” It isn’t a question.

“Yeah. That’s me.”

“I’m terribly sorry for the atrocities that have been committed against you, Beverly.” There is a beat of silence before she continues, and there is not a shred of hesitation in the statement that follows. “He will pay for what he has done to you, and to the others. Hannibal Lecter will pay.”

“Can you help me understand this? What’s happening to me?” Beverly’s voice has grown stronger from the presence of such conviction, the level of unshakable faith and intent in Mrs. Frederic’s voice.

“I can do better than that. I can teach you to control it.”

The first shaft of sunlight breaks through the window, spilling across the floor between them. Mrs. Frederic holds out a hand, a promise offered in her palm.

Beverly takes it. She accepts.


End file.
